Power11 announced by IBM

[Borley]

Much performance flexing. Little to be said about improvements in openness.

https://newsroom.ibm.com/2025-07-08-ibm-power11-raises-the-bar-for-enterprise-it

[ClassicHasClass]

Guess we'll find out on the 25th.

[tle]

they claim P11 is 55% better in raw core performance than P9. I do not doubt such claim though however I am questioning if P11 would be more open-source friendly

[MPC7500]

What is also interesting:

While Power11 doesn't appear to offer any more cores per socket than Power10, Big Blue says those cores are substantially more efficient. With the new chips, IBM is introducing the concept of resource groups, a firmware feature that aims to maximize utilization and increase performance without driving up energy consumption. The chips also feature an energy-saving mode that trades a little bit of performance for a 28 percent improvement in efficiency.

The Register

UPDATE: I have been advised by an anonymous individual with knowledge of the situation that a new Raptor announcement on products under development is scheduled for Q1 2026 ... which would be "six to twelve months after" as predicted. "Open firmware" is specifically mentioned and absolutely planned. It's worth pointing out that both Raptor and SolidSilicon are now listed as top-tier Platinum members for OpenPOWER parallel with IBM itself. That implies SolidSilicon is still in the mix and IBM is still backing OpenPOWER. They stressed this is not an official announcement, so you take it for what it's worth.]

Talospace

I wonder if IBM will sell defective 16-core Power11 as 8 or 4-core Power11 to Raptor.

[MPC7500]

Page 25:

POWER9 clients upgrading to Power11 can reduce energy consumption by up to 60% for the same performance. Power11 outperforms x86 systems, providing twice the performance per watt. Compared to Power10, Power11 offers up to 33% better performance per watt, with the S1022 showing the largest gain.

Page 26:

Energy Efficient Mode
Power11 has introduced a new Energy Efficient mode that, when enabled, can reduce energy consumption by up to 30%, with only an approximate 10% reduction in performance. This impact will vary depending on the system and configuration. The power mode can be dynamically established through the HMC GUI, as illustrated in Figure 1-8.

Page 33:

New P11 Processor Details
Here are some details on the new Power11 processor design:

Technology and Packaging:
– 602mm2 7nm Samsung (18B Devices)
– 18-layer metal stack, enhanced device
– Single-chip or Dual-chip sockets

Computational Capabilities:
– Up to 16 SMT8 Cores (2 MB L2 Cache / core)
– Up to 128 MB L3 cache (low latency non-uniform cache architecture management)
– Enterprise performance focus:
• 3x core performance relative to POWER9
• 2x thread strength relative to POWER9
• 4x L2 cache, 4xMMU/ core relative to POWER9
• 4x crypto engine / core relative to POWER9
– AI computational Focus:
• 2x general SIMD / core relative to POWER9
• 4x matrix SIMD / core relative to POWER9
• New AI Instructions and data types

Robust Data Plane:
– 2 TB/s raw (32GT/s) PowerAXON + OMI signaling
– SMP interconnect for up to 16 sockets
– 2x2 OMI memory bandwidth relative to POWER9
– 64 TB OMI DDR large system memory capacity
– x64 PCIe Gen5 / DCM:2xbandwidth relative to POWER9

IBM Power11 E1150 Introduction and Technical Overview

[power9mm]

Well, hopefully the new raptor systems are much cheaper than the price hikes the power9 offerings had

[tle]

Well, hopefully the new raptor systems are much cheaper than the price hikes the power9 offerings had

IMHO it depends on the outcome of the tariffs war.

If we put aside the pricing, I think we should have learnt by now that the key success lies in how well the software supports the hardware, that is the accessibility to the hardware. Therefore I hope there is a cheap 2C or 4C P11 that would cost less than $500 USD.

[MauryG5]

I seriously doubt there will ever be a Power CPU that costs less than $500. In fact, I think we'll see further increases across the board, unfortunately. The tariffs will especially hurt us Europeans, who will have to pay who knows how much more to buy from America... The overall situation isn't good at all...